Editorial: Hoosier tales of too many, too little

Two items of bad news in The Star on Thursday illustrated a dilemma for Hoosiers trying to cope with a struggling and evolving economy.

A report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute, liberal think tanks, showed that the income gap between Indiana's richest and poorest has grown faster in recent years than those in all but five other states.

Coincidentally with that story by Maureen Groppe of The Star's Washington bureau, a national feature from Bloomberg News spotlighted Purdue University as an example of grotesque growth in administrative costs in higher education.

These cautionary tales intersect.

Hoosiers in the lowest financial brackets, like countless other Americans, are making too little money for the principal reason they are not trained and educated for the demands of this century's workplace.

Postsecondary education, a must for desirable jobs, costs too much for too many families at the traditional four-year campus level.

Purdue officials defend their bevy of more than 30 top-level executives taking in six-figure salaries; but it is nevertheless disturbing to know the school typifies a near-universal phenomenon of administration outpacing tenured faculty in terms of increases at America's research universities.

Meanwhile, tuition and fees have skyrocketed at these public institutions, once prized for their affordability, now comparable to elite private schools in many cases, especially for out-of-state students. The average Indiana University graduate carries $27,000 in loans, part of a national load estimated at $1 trillion.

As the universities snip around the edges of budgets and legislators exhort them to do more, Hoosiers young and old who seek to better their lot will look elsewhere more and more. Ivy Tech Community College, Western Governors University and the plethora of proprietary career colleges will continue growing their share of a market that will have less and less room to grow assistant provosts and vice presidents. Still, it will take the entire constellation of postsecondary educators, growing their offerings and containing their costs, to reverse the growth of the income gap.

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Editorial: Hoosier tales of too many, too little

Two items of bad news in The Star on Thursday illustrated a dilemma for Hoosiers trying to cope with a struggling and evolving economy.